7/22/2023 0 Comments Define damaged goods![]() We know that a severe traumatic event, especially one that is repeated or enduring, can lead to serious long-term negative consequences that are often overlooked even by mental health professionals. This sense of being overwhelmed can be delayed by weeks, years or even decades, as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances. Traumatic experiences in people’s lives, especially in children, completely overwhelm the individual’s ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. This can also be experienced when people or institutions, depended on for survival, violate or betray or disillusion the person in some unforeseen way. Trauma results from a violation of a person’s familiar ideas about the world and of their human rights, putting the person in a state of extreme confusion and insecurity. How deep are the effects of psychological trauma? The questions mount – and challenge our very perception of ourselves, as well as the perception of our professionals. They know they can survive.” Is that good or bad news? I reminded myself of Josephine Hart’s damaging quote: “Damaged people are dangerous. I went to search for the definition of “damaged goods” and discovered that most dictionaries offer a gloomy definition: “A person who is considered to be no longer desirable or valuable because of something that has happened.” “A person considered to be less than perfect psychologically, as a result of a traumatic experience.” Is this true? Do many – and how many – psychologists actually believe that certain life experiences damage you forever? How many feel that some people are actually damaged goods? And how does this bode for the benefits of modern psychology and its interventions? Whoa… I thought to myself: This certainly opens up a Pandora’s box. He actually presented a plausible and even scientific (based on his axioms, that is) argument: Just as body parts can be severed (G-d forbid) in an accident, with no hope of growing back, so too can our psyches incur irreversible damage.” When I pushed him further, wondering what his role as a healer of souls may be, he finally conceded that some damages cannot be repaired. We need to help them find some comfort in other ways.” I didn’t expect that he would share this sentiment with his paying client… “Some people are not destined to find true happiness, especially in that way. Long story short, this particular therapist believes that therapy can soothe, minimize and alleviate some of the pain, hopefully enough to allow this fellow to function better, but damaged goods are damaged goods, and he didn’t have much hope that this individual would become functional enough to build a healthy marriage and family. With his blessing I unabashedly picked up the phone and had a conversation with this mental health professional. I asked him for permission to call his shrink and try to get some clarity. ![]() “So what the am I paying top dollar for therapy when things may never be fixed?!” he blurted out to me – and, I guess, to his therapist. He told me that healing takes time it can often be a lifelong experience, and even then some things may never be fixed.” So where is this therapy going”? The fellow continued: “My therapist’s tepid reply made my heart sink. I don’t feel that I trust anyone, and am pretty sure that no one trusts me. I still am having extreme difficulty dating and building a healthy relationship. “In one of our last sessions,” he told me, “I asked my therapist if he sees me making any progress. This man, at no fault of his own, told me how his entire childhood and growth into adulthood was haunted by one prevailing feeling: “I am damaged goods.”Īnd if this wasn’t bad enough, he related how, after years of intense therapy, he sensed that his own therapist agreed with him. Hearing how an innocent defenseless child has been hurt tears your heart out. With tears in his eyes he shared with me how he was violated and deeply wounded as a child, in ways that I would prefer not to graphically describe here. Even as he discussed himself he did so as if he was speaking about another person, totally aloof and detached.īut then the dam broke. At first he spoke calmly and deliberately. That is, until he began to share his story. ![]() Tall, handsome and articulate, he seemed put together. Not long ago a young man in his early 30’s came to see me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |